Austin Dillon: “The Ford’s are absolutely kicking our tails”

Austin Dillon discusses the search for speed at the Chevy camp; They found speed in an open test, only they didn’t know what caused it

There’s been 14 NASCAR races so far, including the pre-season events. Of those, Ford has won 8 of them. Chevrolet has won two, one Duel and the Daytona 500.

Darrell Wallace Jr (25th), Austin Dillon (26th) and Ryan Newman (33rd). Those were results from Dover for the RCR team as well as the alliance team of Richard Petty Motorsports.

Jimmie Johnson and Kyle Larson were the only Chevy drivers inside the top 10. They finished 9th and 10th.

“Here’s the deal… Today sucked,” Austin Dillon said on his driver out of Dover International Speedway. “For everybody at RCR.”

“But, the silver lining is, it’s one race. We gotta go to work on our cars to get them better. We gotta work on the Camaro ZL1. The Ford’s are absolutely kicking our tails.”

“I’m committed to going to work. Everybody at RCR’s committed to going to work. We’re going to flip this around.”

“The positive thing is, we won the Daytona 500. We got a win in our back pocket. But, we gotta go to work.”

“We are working hard. We have been working hard. We just gotta change directions. We just gotta think harder and smarter.”

“We’ve got a great opportunity and we have to get our cars good by the time the playoffs start.”

Austin Dillon claimed a win in the 2018 Daytona 500. That will likely place him in the playoffs. Assuming more than 16 drivers don’t win a race, he has a guaranteed spot. But, Chevy is far from playoff ready.

Austin Dillon wins the 2018 Daytona 500

Meanwhile, at the front of the field, Kevin Harvick went to victory lane again. The Stewart-Haas #4 Ford claimed his 4th win of the season.

“The #4 car was unreal. He comes by ya at a whole nother level of speed. It’s unreal what he can do through the corner. He’s carrying a couple mile an hour more than us through the center [of the corner]. Pretty impressive.”

This wasn’t the plan heading into the 2018 season. The new Toyota dominated in 2017. Heading into 2018, many expected the same for the new Camaro ZL1 which first hit the track back in February.

Ahead of the season, the exact opposite was expected. Brad Keselowski expected the Ford’s to take a drubbing with the oldest body shape in the field.

However, in the Chevy camp, there still tuning it. That’s across the board, it’s not just RCR. All the Chevrolet teams are in a bit of a slump.

Why?

“In the off-season, when we put the ZL1 body on they were able to kind of tune on their race car. While we’re building race cars and putting bodies on. We’re still trying to figure it out.”

“Chevy’s giving us what we need. We just gotta figure out how to use it. We haven’t figured out our aero balance yet.”

A few weeks ago, NASCAR hosted a test at Michigan International Speedway. The Ford camp spent that day moving things around to find a balance.

“We’d pick up speed and not understand why. We just don’t know the proper why to use the car yet,” Austin Dillon explains.